Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1362

Start of an address to heads of Colleges and Universities

March 7, 1941

 

Eminent Gentlemen:

     It is an exceptional occurrence for an inconspicuous person to be called upon to present to the intellectual elite of the world, such as is personified in yourselves, to give them light and leading, not to say instruction, concerning the profound perplexities and the menacing prospect with which we are now confronted in respect to our public and general, our world outlook and affairs. You, gentlemen, represent, for the most part, the prime intellectual bulwark between the rising tide of Communism and that social order and growth that has given to the modern age all of the power, all of the strength, and all of the beauty that it has achieved.

 

     You are deeply concerned, as I am, with the outlook for the future and you, as educators, not only command by your eminence the public eye and the public ear, but you are also the mental and moral monitors of the generations of youth who come under your cultural care in preparation for the great tasks and achievements that lie before, or must I now say for the great Defense that civilization must make in its modern stand against resurgent barbarism.

     So it is a great and momentous privilege to stand here before you with an opportunity of bringing to your eyes such light as has fallen upon mine respecting the condition in which we find ourselves. How we arrived at this condition and how and where we may and shall go from here.

     At the risk of being tedious, I repeat what has so often come from the tongues and pens of everyone of you: that the modern man has achieved within the last 300 years a physical and material power over nature, over his whole material environment that was never known before. The physical technology of the modern world transcends every achievement and realizes almost every hope and dream of the ancient and medieval world respecting material things.

 

     We have no lack in this respect. But we do not know how to bless ourselves with the gifts that modern science has bestowed. Our psychology has not kept pace with our technology. All our history, all our tradition, all our philosophy, our art, our politics, we have inherited through ages of darkness from the slave civilizations of our ancient past. We are not only tainted, we are steeped in the spiritual limitations which that heritage has imposed. In this, what might well be our shame, our intellectual disgrace, we have taken smug and complacent self-satis­faction that has risen even to intellectual arrogance and pride. But the material edifice we have so nobly built is now shaking on its base, and so we come together in what earnestness and humility we can command to take counsel of one another, seeking some higher light to perceive, some deeper truths to sound.

     The modern material technique, born of the expanding minds of men in an expanding physical world and effectuated by world transportation, communication, trade and exchange gives to the present age a transcendent potential power over material things without any corresponding spiritual and cultural growth. For the moment I will not speak of the constrictions of the past upon our psychology and philosophy and our practices of essential religion through the inspirational arts, but will confine myself to our political heritage handed down in all essential respects from the remotest times. Our political insti­tutions possess every weakness and every lack of stability that their past entails. The dreary cycle of change from the mere transfer of absolute power from the one to the many, the many to the few, and from the few back again to the one, is still going on under our very eyes.

     To break this endless round, we must concern ourselves not with the mere transference, apportionment and divi­sion of this power, but with the transformation of rulership and command into services by consent and exchange. The technique of force and fraud in public affairs must give way to the transcendent technique of mutual service by exchange. This necessary emergence out of relations of force and fraud has been very largely completed with respect to all our private services. In these we recognize no validity except that of consent and exchange. But in our public and community affairs, we have developed this social and civilized technique almost not at all. We are, therefore, trying to conduct a highly social-ized system of economic relationships under the physical dominance of political institutions that have virtually no tech­nique but that which rests either immediately or ultimately upon the technique of war. We have believed that this destructive power when divided among many and administered by an elected few could thus lose its destructive nature and become a salvation and service to mankind. But his­tory has admonished us not to sink too deeply into this belief, and so we feel that our political democracy must not be practiced too far; that its powers must be limited, divided and curtailed lest it overwhelm its creators in the future as in the past it always has.

     There is among us, however, a body of doctrine and of men who are blind to these admonitions. They take our belief in salvation through political agency and activity right to its logical end and would establish the complete dominance of government over all the economic and business affairs that are now conducted under so many political burdens and restraints by the social-ized technique of contract and consent and exchange. These social philo­sophers are complacent to the mountainous burden of public debt and the rising tide of taxation that threatens to engulf us. They would have political authority displace completely the social process of exchange by taking over all capital and placing all productive property under political administration by compulsion and decree. This is the philosophy of the Socialists and Communists whose voices rise around us and whose conspiracies are under­mining the very citadels of our intellectual life over which you, gentlemen, preside.

     Let me submit that they are more logical than you. You accept and believe in the limited tyranny of taxation. You accept the present day seizures of one-quarter to a third of the national income. They carry your philo­sophy to its logical extreme in their proposal of unlimited taxation in what they perversely call the completely “socialized” State. Small wonder that, in the distress which public authority by its technique of force and fraud upon our truly social-ized relationships has already brought upon us, a large portion of your educational personnel should carry your philosophy of government and public services by force to its logical extreme of proposing, however unwittingly, to destroy the whole fabric of our social-ized system of exchange by placing it under the dominance of a supposedly benevolent but in reality a political and anti-social power.

     In this matter we all feel that a crisis impends. We must find some means to stem the rising tide. But our almost universal counsel is resistance and war which, if it should succeed, can be only another step in the historic round of shifting the succession to or the mere distribution of physical and political power.

It is time for the modern mind to awake,  etc. etc. etc.